Word: yalta
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Welcome one and all to TIME Daily's cinematic Yalta. CP has invited three of his colleagues to convene with him in this space and exercise man's oldest right: the right to make lists of one's favorite things...
With the war approaching its end, the two democratic leaders met Stalin at Yalta. Some say that this meeting brought about the division of Europe. In fact, far from endorsing Soviet control of Eastern Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill secured from Stalin pledges of "the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people." Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements to achieve his ends--which would seem to prove the agreements were more in the Western than the Soviet interest. In fact, Eastern Europe today is what the Yalta Declarations mandated...
...alike on the infinite--with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. The bomb rendered all decisions made so far at Yalta and at Potsdam mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets. When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible...
...Stalin asked sarcastically when it was suggested that the Pope join the Yalta talks: ?How many divisions does he command?? Wei had been one of the most celebrated opponents of the Communist regime in Beijing, but freedom and exile may propel him into the political wilderness...
After every great war the victors search for a way to safeguard their gains. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was intended to disarm Germany and keep it weak. Following World War II, the Allies tried at Yalta and Potsdam to shape a reordered Europe but ended up splitting it between East and West. Now another world struggle, the long, bitter cold war, has ended, and the architects of security are back at their drawing boards. They are trying to seal peace and stability into Europe's future and, although they don't say so very loudly, hedge against...